Jerome Reyes mused: > > I remember playing with a pre-production model a couple of years ago at > GFM before the camera hit the market. Everything worked fine on it... > except the battery indicator would flip out more often than not. It would > show depletion... but then if you turned the camera off and on, or better > yet just let it sit for a while, and it would be totally full again. The > joke was that the camera was self-charging. But in all seriousness, we > were told that this was the last kink in the system that Pentax had to > work out... but perhaps they didn't quite get it right until a few > production lines rolled. > > <shrug>
That's about my attitude to it, too. I think the battery indicator just samples the voltage occasionally, rather than being a continuous meter. If the camera was busy (focussing, writing to the CF card, etc.) at the time the voltage was measured, you can end up with a transient low-charge indicator which goes away the next time the voltage is measured. As you have found, one way to force a new measurement is to turn the camera off and back on again; I've found that simply half-depressing the shutter to trigger the auto-focus, exposure metering, etc. generally works as well. I've learned to ignore the transients. But as soon as the indicator goes off full charge, and stays there no matter what I do, I treat it as a signal to change the batteries at the next convenient opportunity. That's almost certainly an overly-conservative approach, but it's cheap enough; I carry at least a dozen extra charged batteries as well as the eight in the camera and grip. I don't see the point in risking missing a shot by trying to squeeze every last electron out of a battery.
